`Grapes Of Wrath` Grads

Migrant Kids From Leo Hart`s School Left Depression Poverty In The Dust

SHAFTER, CALIF. — In this quiet rural community just north of Bakersfield, an old man with a twinkle in his eye sits in a rocking chair. Back in the 1930s townsfolk called him a communist. Today he has their respect and admiration. Wild dogs, dirt roads, abandoned farm machinery and a flooded field make his cottage nearly inaccessible. Leo Hart doesn`t travel much anymore or see many people, but at age 89 he has a keen mind, a sharp wit and a story worth telling.

Fifty years ago ``The Grapes of Wrath`` was published, the John Steinbeck tale of the migrant Joad family and their struggle to make a new life for themselves in California during the Depression. Rusting jalopies and flatbed trucks loaded down with pots and pans, bedding and desperate-looking people:

It all happened the way John Steinbeck described it, Hart says, except for the children of the ``Grapes of Wrath.``

In the book and the Academy Award-winning film, the Joads end up at Weedpatch Camp, broke, without work, and with little hope. Not so for some of the real-life migrants. In 1939 Leo Hart was elected superintendent of Kern County Schools, and he built a school next to Weedpatch Camp just for the children of the migrants. The story of that school, as Hart tells it, is as gripping as Steinbeck`s fiction.

Nineteen thirty-nine was a hard year for the Dust Bowlers. Drought still gripped the Central Plains and the Southwest, and Route 66, bearing weary migrants from Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas to Kern County, was still crowded with people wearing baggy overalls, tattered dresses and the look of down-and- out poverty. They called themselves ``Okies.`` Most believed there was work in California, so they joined the caravan of Model A`s and ramshackle buses and headed for the Great San Joaquin, the rich agricultural valley where, they heard, pickers were needed.

By 1940, some 180,000 migrants had settled in the rural areas of the San Joaquin Valley, and Kern county experienced its greatest population explosion. The reception of the Dust Bowlers was less than hospitable: Most residents of Kern County saw them as unproductive, socially unacceptable.

In 1938 irate farmers, armed with pitchforks, guns, bricks and clubs, attacked the migrants of Weedpatch Camp at night and tried to drive them out. Hundreds of Okies went to jail, but they returned to the camp. In 1940 the county banned ``The Grapes of Wrath`` from its public libraries. Armed patrols guarded the county`s borders, Hart recalls, and the sheriff, goaded by an outraged citizenry, burned down the migrant camp under the Kern River Bridge because of unsanitary conditions.

``They were victims of the greatest economic depression this country has ever experienced,`` Hart says, recalling visions of migrants living ``on ditch banks, in shacks, in tents, in squalor and filth.`` Still they came. And perhaps as many as two-thirds of the transients were children who shared the adversity of their parents-and additional hostility as well.

The children looked like war refugees from a distant country, and in a way they were. Their hand-me-down trousers and skirts were secured with rope and twine. A soup bowl and a pair of old scissors were used for haircuts. Those who had shoes were lucky if they had socks. All the kids looked undernourished and in need of medical attention. They spoke a different language, they possessed a different culture, they lacked skills in hygiene and in ``manners, morals and etiquette,`` Hart recollects.

With little or no formal education, the children of the Dust Bowl crowded into Kern County`s schools: The results were predictable. Teachers and taxpayers believed the newcomers were ``uneducable,`` and their appearance offensive. Swiftly, the children were either banned from the public schools or forced to sit on the floor in the back of crowded classrooms, humiliated.

The Parent-Teacher Association excluded migrant parents from its meetings. Teachers ignored the unkempt pupils. Fellow students disparaged them as ``Okies.`` With their fists they defended themselves, and harsh discipline or dismissal followed.

Enter the new superintendent of public schools. Hart had earned a master`s degree from the University of Arizona and had served as head counselor in the Kern County High School District before becoming

superintendent in 1939.

``The big problem for me,`` Hart said, ``was to find out what to do for these children to get them adjusted into society and to take their rightful place.`` He saw the Dust Bowl children as having special physical, social and educational needs, but he also saw them as ``ordinary kids with the same hopes and dreams the rest of us have.``

With initiative, hard work and a dose of Western pragmatism-and without aid from federal, state or local governments-the migrant children just might take their rightful place, Hart thought.